Saturday, 8 March 2014

(Over) analysing The Bureau: XCOM Declassified’s chest-high walls (to within an inch of their lives)

I’ve done a
close reading of the chest-high walls in The Bureau: XCOM Declassified and I’m
happy to report that I think they could be a meditation on the tangible benefits
of improved graphics. Furthermore, I reckon their implementation also questions
if our lust to achieve increased verisimilitude between real and digital worlds
is misguided.

In some of the Metal
Gear games the player can take part in extracurricular virtual reality
simulations. These largely take on the form of challenges, where the player is
to focus entirely on their grasp of and prowess with game mechanics, unhindered
by the troubles of setting, story, and the like. These VR excursions, in the
guise of computerised training programmes, strip away all of these
‘distractions’ and stick the player-character in a glowing, geometric world
made of cubes. In doing so, it could be said that the games are making a
statement about where the real importance - the heart, if you were - of videogames truly lies. That while
videogames are forced to inhabit the
trappings of cinema, theatre and literature to attain wider cultural
acceptance, the actual hallmark of the medium is, has and always will be the
simple pleasures of the player moving things on a screen, and not some
highfaluting screen moving the
player. Pah.

Pleasure, gained from dicking about in a virtual place, is often
seen as too basic a human response to be taken seriously, the mechanics used to
elicit it too mechanical, so there’s
always been a tendency for videogames to pile things on top of those cubes. Indeed,
games like Donkey KongLand always felt somewhat imprecise, preciselybecause of the incongruity between a platform’s geometric collision
and the fancy graphics slapped in front of it. This was especially problematic
when just making a jump, as many
platform edges actually started a few pixels back from where their lavish
foliage or rock textures would have you believe.

By the end of the SNES and Megadrive era games played on a
two-dimensional plane were ridiculously detailed, rarely resembling the
primitive menagerie of floating Euclidean elements that they’d previously been.
Three dimensions soon put a stop to these artistic strides though (ha!), and
videogames were once again forced to curtail their aesthetic aspirations. An
early Playstation title like Jumping
Flash! is a good example of these constraints playing out. The visuals are
relatively rudimentary as to facilitate the game’s ambitious vision of a
sprawling 3D platform game, where levels are vast both horizontally and
vertically. A prettier game could
have been made, but then the mechanical design would have had to be scaled
down, a sacrifice the development team clearly didn’t feel comfortable making.

Visuals normally play second fiddle to gameplay when an
either/or situation is forced at the birthing of new technologies, except when
highlighting new visual capabilities is the raison d’être of a particular
title. For examples, see FantaVision,
Knack and That Dinosaur Demo.

Once technologies have become established and developers are
comfortable in working with them, we see visual fidelity, vibrancy and detail usually increase steadily until that
technology is superseded, be that by new console hardware or some meaningful
software revision. Generally speaking, the best visual treatments are achieved
by the later inhabitants of one of these technological cycles. This is, of
course, purely in an objective, technology-focused sense and in no way equates
better technology with higher levels of visual artistry, though clearly: the
bigger the palette the more options available to the skilled painter. This trend can be seen explicitly throughout the Playstation
3 games of Naughty Dog, with all but one of their four games being lauded as
having simply the best visuals the
console could possibly ever produce.

It’s refreshing, then, that The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, a game released in the final months
of a console generation, appears to have shrugged off this trend of exponential
visual improvement, favouring instead a good old fashioned focus on vidyagaming
gameplaying play. It’s a fitting end to this particular technology cycle;
effectively closing the generation with a meditation on the tangible benefits
of improved graphics, questioning if increased verisimilitude between real and
digital worlds actually does give us
anything of worth.

The Bureau is a tactical squad-based cover shooter, where the
player, inhabiting Agent William Carter, leads a team of three through various
battles against an alien invasion force in the early 1960s. Carter is
controlled in a very familiar third-person action game way; able to run, take
cover behind chest-high walls and jump down - but not up - small ledges. The tactical aspects of the game take shape when
Carter s-l-o-w-s down time and issues commands to his two compatriots. Their
abilities are a mixed bag of offensive, defensive and buff-type specials, and a
well-managed team can quite easily take down huge enemies if abilities are
combined effectively. Much of the game, then, is spent huddling Carter behind a
wall and issuing commands while everything continues slowly around you.
Mechanically it’s fine: Carter and his team gently unlock new abilities to add
to the old tactical arsenal, and receiving a ‘COMBO KILL’ award for being
tactically proficient is somewhat gratifying. Them walls though; they are the
most important part of the whole thing.

That picture, the one just over there, is a shot from the
first proper mission in the game. It’s set in small town America and is full of
postcard-level nostalgic sincerity. One of the characters even comments on how
unfortunate it is that an alien invasion came to pass on Homecoming parade day.
Aw shucks.

What is interesting about these beginning parts of the game
is their utter banality. They follow their genre template slavishly, giving the
player their requisite collection of hidey-walls - without which the game,
mechanically speaking, wouldn’t work at all - and then attempting to build a
somewhat believable setting around them. In our example we’ve got some hay
bales, a car and a parade float all lined up, very unnaturally, at orderly
angles to one another. Almost every cover-surface - let’s agree to just call
them walls - in this and all the
other areas of the game which necessitate them, are at either ninety or
forty-five degree angles to one another. This means that the urban areas are
usually filled with lots of barricades, cars, wooden crates and trucks, as the
level designers try in vain to build mechanically viable, yet real
world-congruent combat arenas. There’s one early skirmish set in an impossibly
large geometric garden. It’s filled with a symmetrical layout of walls that
play wonderfully in terms of playing the
game, but look rather awkward when imagining the garden existing in real life.
To further exemplify this dissonance, once this area is conquered you turn a
corner and enter another garden, this
one populated by terraces at varying elevations, all unnecessary stairs and
vantage points. It’s as if the garden was expressly designed with the distant
possibility of it some day playing host to a pitched battle between man and
machine-inhabiting alien invader.

It’s nothing new though, and ever sine that Gears of War popularised (though by no
means invented) the modern cover shooter, designers have been trying to
organically fit their walls into levels the best they can. It’s all a bit like
that Donkey Kong game I pointedly mentioned earlier, the one about beautifying
the hard surfaces of gameplay with lashings of pretty textures. REMEMBER that
bit: it’s important for later.

The Bureau does something fascinating with its walls the
further into the game you go. In the Homecoming parade level - just after the above
picture was taken actually - you’re first introduced to alien walls. They are essentially grey, metallic sheets that are
‘grown’ by your extraterrestrial adversaries and can sprout up on the battlefield
at any given moment, without any need
for further narrative or formal justification. The game initially implements
them as a means of reusing areas for new combat scenarios; you get to one end
of a battlefield and suddenly enemies saunter up behind you with a new set of
cover, ultimately double dipping the area and elongating its usefulness. I,
though, think the game is saying a lot more with these alien walls than might,
at first, be obvious.

As the game progresses these new walls pop up - pun intended
- more and more frequently. Later levels often begin in an urban or rural
setting, only to quickly burrow underground into caverns lined, floored, roofed
and chock full of alien walls to hide behind. Later still, missions take place
entirely in alien space stations, completely circumventing the cloying
quaintness of the earlier sepia-tinged levels and their awkward gameplay versus
aesthetics juxtapositions.

As you can see in this final picture, in moving the game’s
events out of recognisable locales,
the designers no longer need to worry about making the placement of cover feel
natural. If anything, it’s in their interest to do the exact opposite, these
being alien installations after all.
It’s in these final levels where the game fully casts off the shackles of
modern design conventions and effectively says “bugger it, what’s the point in
titting about trying to make this look convincing; it NEVER WILL.” The funny
gardens from the beginning are recreated with alien walls, and suddenly make
perfect sense in this new, gameplay-only focused paradigm. The awkwardness of
contextualising its level design is gone by the end of the game: The Bureau is
liberated by simply shunning Videogames’ need to look like something other than a simple, honest challenge.

The Bureau should be celebrated for its bravery in swimming
against the current of accepted videogame design. It fearlessly deconstructs
the prevailing notion that videogames must not only constantly strive to look better, but also appear more
naturalistic as the medium and its technology advances. As The Bureau
progresses, it subtly strips away the layers of peripheral aesthetics normally seen
as a necessity in modern games, until at its end it is visually little more
than a VR mission from Metal Gear Solid; an experience completely defined by
its mechanics alone, uninterested in anything threatening to overcomplicate the
purity of its experience.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, then, is an example of formalist
purpose not oft seen from videogame designers, especially ones working in big
budget, triple-a development. In stripping away its visual niceties, the game
is bringing into stark focus its creators’ opinions on where the true creative
importance of a videogame lies. It is a searing polemic against the spiralling
costs of making these types of games: an argument that pretty-yet-functionless
graphics are a waste of money, and one no doubt inspired by the game’s own
years of difficult development.

2 comments:

Great reading into The Bureau! I actually ended up buying this game by accident, thinking it was the older X-Com that was released a few years ago. I ended up playing The Bureau more than Enemy Unknown in the end!

Your post made me recall an early mission in the game where you end up teleporting aboard one of the alien ships. Suddenly the game switches into that very minimalistic, VR mission style. It's a very jarring transition to the player at that early point, but you get a sudden taste of the endgame battleground style of play. I actually forgot about that part until I read your article. Thinking back it's definitely foreshadowing to the speedball-like endgame style of play. I'm not a cover game fan at all, but The Bureau really makes the whole thing work. If you've read the backstory of how the game was developed, it's amazing it came out at all, let alone as well as it did!

I read the Polygon piece before I played the game and meant to link to it at some point in the piece but it slipped my mind. It certainly sounds like the game went through quite a few pairs of hands before it finally saw release, and yeah, it's not often a game manages to pull through that sort of a development and still ship.

I still think it's a shame nobody was able to find a satisfactory way to make the more abstract alien designs and research-focused gameplay work; those early ideas for the game we're really exciting and certainly peaked my interest when I heard about them a few years ago. Still, they were - and still are - ambitious aspirations, so I don't blame anyone for not managing to make entirely new gameplay paradigms work first time.

Me

I'm a graduate of film and currently work in film and TV post production. I write with the aim of furthering some (any) sort of discourse about video games.
I can be reached on the twitter @leighharhar.